CRISIS AT LA SCALA

THE INDEPENDENT
20 March 2005

































 


Riccardo Muti: The monster of Milan

The opera has seen its fair share of prima donnas. But generally they appear on the stage, not in front of it wielding a baton. And few can match the tantrums, demands and vanity of the conductor of La Scala, whose behaviour led to a walk-out last week by the entire house. Franco Zeffirelli described him as 'drunk on himself' and accuses him of debasing his art. And that's not the half of it...

By David Mellor

20 March 2005

It's not often a conductor makes front-page news except when he dies, but Italian maestro Riccardo Muti is managing it pretty often these days. Last year, it was by walking out of a long-gestated Covent Garden production for the most spurious of reasons; someone had lopped off a bit of the scenery. This week he is headline news again as almost the entire workforce, from musicians to chippies and hat-check girls at Italy's premier opera house, La Scala, Milan, walked out in protest at his autocratic rule.

Carlo Fontana, the general manager whose ousting at Muti's behest brought on the crisis, declared: "The people of La Scala have rejected absolute monarchy." But Muti, universally known, not necessarily admiringly, as Napoleone, will not be easy to shift. He's been there for almost 20 years and is as robust a musical politician as he is a conductor.

Perhaps shrewdly, he has turned the issue into a party political issue at a sensitive time in Italy with elections on the horizon. With the left baying for blood, the Berlusconi administration, at national and city level, has had to back Muti. Culture minister Giuliano Urbani said last week he hoped Muti would remain at La Scala "for the present and for years to come". Napoleone himself does not seem ready for St Helena just yet.

So what manner of man is this Muti? He's a good-looking fellow with, even at 63, a mane of lustrous black hair, of which he is inordinately proud. His detractors say his character can be summed up in a single anecdote.

The story goes that Muti was marooned in the Sahara without water, and with a remorseless sun beating down. For days he is without refreshment and he cries out in vain to God for water. Finally God relents. He invites Muti to cup his hands, and pours a dozen precious drops into them. The grateful Muti runs his fingers through his hair.

Muti is now reaping the whirlwind of all the years he has allowed his temperament to upstage his talent. But what a talent it was. "The most musical of all the conductors I've ever worked with," one leading recording executive told me.

But the reopening of La Scala shows Muti at his worst. Damning the proposed programme after four years of closure for being too populist, Muti high-handedly substituted one of his own, containing half a dozen operas that haven't been done in modern times. And talent or no talent, most people in the house have had enough of a regime where, as one described it, "Supplicants gather outside his door like the Marschallin's levée."

Many years ago, when Muti was still a normal human being, he seemed the most naturally gifted and charismatic conductor of his generation. Born in 1941 in Naples, and originally trained musically by his doctor father, Muti excelled at the Milan conservatoire, and was still in his twenties when appointed music director of the prestigious Maggio Musicale in Florence in 1968.

He built his reputation as an operatic conductor, and his exceptional ability with singers has been apparent throughout his career. But, in 1972, when the ailing Otto Klemperer vacated the conductor's chair at the Philharmonia in London, the orchestra offered the young Italian the chance to show he was as good on the podium as in the pit. And Muti seized the chance with both hands, as he and his rejuvenated band embarked on a decade of exceptional music-making with, among other joys, stunning performances of the symphonies of Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Schumann, all of them happily preserved on disc.

Audiences warmed to the hot-blooded but engaging young Italian, and so too did the critics, though that wasn't to last. But put on any of the EMI recordings of the period, and the magic comes back. Just as it did briefly in an exceptional concert to mark the Philharmonia's 60th birthday in January.

But to regard those early CDs as displaying the best of him is a backhanded compliment, because they should have been supplanted by even better, more mature interpretations, after Muti moved on to the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-1992). He also had guest slots with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and pretty much everywhere else, making many recordings along the way.

But greatness never quite happened. Musical taste moved on, but Muti didn't. He is a masterful fellow, a self-made man who loves his maker. A good manager would have told him not to end his EMI connection, and lurch freelance into a series of short term liaisons with other companies yielding little or nothing of lasting merit.

But Muti has never had a proper manager. He thinks he hasn't needed one. He was indeed the most gifted of his generation in the opera house, as his early EMI recordings of Aida and Macbeth testify, but there was no one to insist that he keep up to date in the concert hall, broaden his repertory or keep his own behaviour under control.

Muti is an old-fashioned "wall of sound" man. Not for him the lighter, springier touch of contemporaries who have learnt something from the period performance movement. Even an autocrat like the great Sir Georg Solti started changing his style towards the end, as in his sprightly recording of Haydn's Creation. And our own Sir Charles Mackerras, a musician as much loved as he is respected, is, in his 80th year, finally in demand in Berlin and in Vienna because he has made himself a bridge between tradition and the authenticists. Muti hasn't been in Berlin for years.

A senior figure in orchestral management who likes and admires Muti says he is "the most maestro-ish of all maestros". This is not an age of autocrats, he continued, yet Muti behaves "as if he is vying with Toscanini to be the most outrageous of them all". As self-belief degenerated into self-love, Muti broke the golden rule of flattery - enjoy it but don't inhale. And thus did the engaging young genius of the Philharmonia become the monster of Milan.

So whither Muti now? Instead of straddling the musical world like a colossus, he has found in La Scala his last redoubt. And an uncertain one. In his mid-sixties, he should be entering his greatest phase as a conductor. But he isn't.

Of course if La Scala ends in tears, he is too talented not to be snapped up somewhere, and maybe somewhere good. But nothing like as good as it should have got for a man who ought by now to have been at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic.

The last world should go to the legendary director Franco Zeffirelli, not a left-winger like most of Muti's Milan critics, nor a stranger to egomania. In a virulent outburst Zeffirelli first denounced Muti's Scala regime: "La Scala has lost that magic. It has become the Vanity Fair of a mediocre conductor. The level of La Scala has gone down the sink."

And then he really got personal. Muti, he said, is "... drunk with himself, drugged by his own art, and his own personal vanity. He can only talk about himself. He has become a caricature of a maestro."

All very sad. And the saddest thing of all is that apart from Muti himself, no one has told Zeffirelli he is wrong. It could and should all have been so different.

Link to Musicweb.uk.net

Updates

07/04/2005 Editorial (Muti and La Scala)
07/04/2005 Radio TV
07/04/2005 Classica
May 2005
26/03/2005 Norman Lebrecht about the crisis at La Scala
21/03/2005 Claudio Abbado about Cuba
14/02/2005 Critic of the concert on February 13th
14/02/2005 Concert in Caracas on February 13th
27/01/2005 Wanderer 16: Cuba (with special pics)
27/01/2005 News from concert in Cuba
26/01/2005 Program 2004-2005 of Claudio Abbado updated
26/01/2005 Other news from venezuela's first concert of OJL
18/01/2005 Other news from venezuela
17/01/2005 Claudio Abbado and Southamerican Youthorchestra (2)
16/01/2005 Claudio Abbado and Southamerican Youthorchestra
14/01/2005 Radio TV
14/01/2005 Cuba
06/01/2005 Cuba's gallery
06/01/2005 Cuba Wanderer
06/01/2005 Infobox
28/11/2004 Radio TV
23/11/2004 Programme Lucerne 2005
16/11/2004 Other pictures (Bologna & Orchestra Mozart)
15/11/2004 New pictures (Bologna & MCO)
15/11/2004 Infobox
15/10/2004 The Guardian, 15 october 2004
15/10/2004 Editorial
15/10/2004 Season 2004-2005
15/10/2004 Orchestra Mozart
19/09/2004

Musicweb (CD Mahler Debussy)

19/09/2004 Wanderer 14: Lucerne 2004 (Beethoven and Mahler V )
11/09/2004

Musicweb (seen and heard)

09/09/2004 Lucerne 2004: Member's pics
09/09/2004 Wanderer 13: Lucerne 2004 (Strauss and Wagner )
04/09/2004 New CD
04/09/2004 New DVD
26/08/2004 Lucerne 2004: New York Times
26/08/2004 Lucerne 2004: El Pais (Mahler)
26/08/2004 Lucerne 2004:  El Pais (Tristan)
26/08/2004 next saison 2004-2005: Update n.3
26/08/2004 next saison 2004-2005: Update n.2
22/08/2004 Infobox
22/08/2004 Lucerne 2004: Articles
22/08/2004 Radio TV
06/07/2004 New releases
29/06/2004 Wanderer 12: Berlin June 2004
27/06/2004 Claudio's birthday: The party of CAI in Milan : our pics
14/06/2004 Gallery of CAI member's pics Berlin 2004
08/06/2004 Our Gallery of Berlin 2004
03/06/2004 Radio TV
02/05/2004 Wanderer 11: Two mad girls...
19/04/2004 Wanderer 10: GMJO in Bolzano
07/04/2004 New CD  Netrebko/Abbado
20/03/2004 Infocai: CAI's general assembly
20/03/2004 Classica TV (Ital) March-April 2004
20/03/2004 Infobox
24/02/2004 Cordula Groth pics (Vienna 2002)
24/02/2004 Radio TV
22/02/2004 Our Gallery of Ferrara 2004 (Members of CAI)
22/02/2004 Our Gallery of Ferrara 2004 (Così fan tutte)
04/01/2004 DVD list updated
30/12/2003 Editorial december 2003
23/11/2003 Translation of the book "Musica sopra Berlino" in Japan
18/11/2003 Program of Lucerne Festival 2004
( Lucerne Festival Orchestra cyclus)
18/11/2003 Praemium Imperiale to Claudio Abbado Tokyo: our pics
14/10/2003 Honorary doctorate of Basilicata's University to Claudio Abbado, our pics
13/09/2003 An incredible pic
8/09/2003 Program 2004, first elements
26/08/2003 The New York Times 
25/08/2003 Wanderer :
conclusions
24/08/2003 Wanderer 19:
Mahler II
24/08/2003 Wanderer 18:
Bach
16/08/2003 Chronique du Wanderer 17: Ouverture du Lucerne Festival
08/08/2003 Lucerne
03/08/2003 Discography
14/07/2003 Editorial
14/07/2003 Claudio Abbado is 70

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